


Decision Tree

by Carbon65



Series: Repository [2]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Career Change, Character Study, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Gen, Graduate School, Intraspection, Permanent Injury, PhDont, Postdoc life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-08
Updated: 2019-04-08
Packaged: 2020-01-07 01:27:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18400331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carbon65/pseuds/Carbon65
Summary: She stares at the ad in her inbox and doesn’t know what to do with it. It represents… it represents a choice and she’s not sure if she’s ready to make it yet.Barbara contemplates life, academia, and her future.





	Decision Tree

> A decision tree is a decision support tool that uses a tree-like model of decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility. It is one way to display an algorithm that only contains conditional control statements.

[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_tree)

* * *

She stares at the ad in her inbox and doesn’t know what to do with it. It represents… it represents a choice and she’s not sure if she’s ready to make it yet.

Today was hard. It’s been a long time since she cried at work. These days, it only happens when she’s tired. These days, tears are simply a sign that she’s pushed her body beyond its limits. She longs for the days when her body’s limits were the kind of deep, well earned ache in her muscles from strenuous exercise, but these days, the range of those limits feel much smaller. She’s in control of her body, and she can trust it. But, part of trusting it means honoring limits.

It’s been a long time since she sat in her office and cried because of something directly work related. It feels like a long time since she gave voice to the question that plagued her PhD: whether she was worth the cost of the work, and whether Barbara Gordon had any value beyond what she could produce.

There’s plenty of her that still isn’t sure. Losing Batgirl is something she’s still not sure whether she will ever be over. The might-have-beens gnaw like a phantom limb, a question of who she could have been if things were different. She’s no longer a vigilante, and she’ll never work inside law enforcement. She’s seen too much of the inside of the police system with her dad to ever be able to believe fully in justice through the legal system, and she’s not in a place to work outside it any more. Perhaps the best she can hope for is changing things with her research. Information as a weapon, rather than her fists and Batarangs.

Today, though, today of all days, she wonders why she’s doing it, and whether it’s worth it. She doesn’t know if the problem is her pride… but the problem is always her pride. She’s too sharp in too many places, sharp in ways they call brittle. She was always afraid as a child that the reason she couldn’t get along with her classmates was because she was too dumb… and maybe it was because she was too smart. Instead of learning to get along, all school taught her was to fight until she got ahead. Gotham Public Schools didn’t exactly reward group work, and her PhD feels late to learn.

It’s just been a hell of a day. A hell of a collaboration. Yet another example for the Barbara Gordon book of Days She Was a Bitch and Times Barbara Couldn’t Keep her Mouth Shut and yet another door she might have closed.

She… she wants to do research. She wants to change the world with information and with her pen and her fingers and her mind if she can’t do it with her fists. She wants to make the world safer. And, she thinks she can do it. With a well assembled team, with the right team… she could find things that would lead to policy changes that would make things better.

Except… except… except it feels like the only way to get there would be tenure track. And, she doesn’t know if she wants to pay that cost. But, to have a prayer, she’ll need another two or three years of a postdoc and another four or five papers and a better lid on her temper. She’ll have to figure out how to get grant funding. She’ll have to figure out how to manage people. She’ll have to figure out how to manage herself. And, she’s afraid she’ll have to do it largely on her own because God knows the only relationship with a superior she’s ever really been able to manage was her relationship with Batman. And, that was a loose affiliation, anyway. She would have been a terrible Robin.

To get to tenure, she’d have to sell herself, body and soul, to the dream of a lab for the next fifteen years. Her postdoc, plus junior faculty appointment, plus the time to tenure. And then, after tenure, keep hustling to keep a lab of people who depend on her funded. he people she sees who are successful work twelve-hour days that end in y. They have partners who pick up the slack at home because they (mostly men) don’t have time for cooking or cleaning or child care. Eric has a son who’s maybe… five? Eric took three days off after his son was born. Matthew came on a Tuesday and Eric was back in the lab on Friday, doing work. Not full time (that would come a whole two weeks after the birth), but back to work. These days, she’s not sure how many nights a week Eric is home to tuck his child into bed. She has a sense of how many nights he spends on the road. Admittedly, Eric is a big name, but she’s also pretty sure that he travels fifteen days a month.

And, when… if… she becomes tenured, her job will become grant writing… she likes the idea of designing experiments, she likes the idea of coming up with new problems and creative ways to solve them. She doesn’t like being told that what she wants to do will cost too much money, or that she has to get small money first. She doesn’t like the idea of sitting in a constant spiral, waiting for the next batch of money to come in so she can publish off this one. She doesn’t like the feeling that because she missed out on early grant funding she’ll never be in a position to get it, that there was some mystical window early in her career where she should have been doing this and wasn’t.

The thing she wants, when it comes down to it, is to be in the thick of things. She’s always liked to be where the action is. She’s always liked to have a hand in the data. And, it doesn’t seem to matter whether or not you want a hand in the data, as you get further along you move further away from getting to sit and listen to what the data tells you until all you hear are second hand whispers from the lucky person who does get to play oracle and listen. Barbara knows her strengths. Data is one of them. People? Eh. People suck. There are not!people, but they’re few and far between and tend not to work in academia. And, she’d rather listen to data than people any day of the week.

 

And, maybe that’s the problem. She’s staring at the choice between what might be a promising tenure track career and what feels right in her gut. Barbara Gordon is stubborn to a fault. Its not that she can’t choose battles, but certain people in her life have commented on the fact that she tends to pick battles that don’t make sense. Choosing battles was one thing when she was running the rooftops, but now… Oh God. Now its about working with these assholes.

She hates the fact that they all seem to know what they’re doing and want her to do it their way. She’s done it their way, and it doesn’t work. She’s tired of them deciding what the data should say without listening to it. She’s tired fo the way they play into confirmation bias. Not just that standard question of “Do my results fall within a reasonable range of magnitude for what I’m seeing” but out to, “We can’t publish these because they contradict the prevailing feeling in the field”. (And what about when the prevailing analyses seem to be wrong?)

Mostly, she doesn’t want to submit, whatever that means. She doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to fight, doesn’t want to throw her career away, but she doesn’t want to submit either and give in and say that its all fine and she’ll play nicely with people who disrespect her, but more importantly, disrespect the work. With people who view her as disrespectful. Her dad had once commented that the worst partnerships were the ones where both parties though the other should feel lucky to work with them, instead of the other way around. Normally, she does feel lucky to work with her collaborators. This time, its just… She’s not lucky, she’s angry.

And, so, today, of all days, is the day the posting about the job in Gotham comes up. There’s a research librarian job at GSU with a possibility for some teaching and some research affiliations with one of the informatics cores. It’s not the prestige of a tenure track position. If she takes it, there will be no lauded “Gordon Group”. It will only ever be her, and a struggle to publish on top of everything else. She will give up on that promise and that potential that everyone else seems to make her want to live up to. And, sometimes, she wonders how much of that is for them, and how much is for her.

And damn it, right now, she wants to go home. She wants it so badly she can feel the ache down into her toes. She’s only been away from Gotham for three months, and already, it feels like far too long. She knows others have left for longer, that some people run away and never return. But, Barbara has always felt… if not safe, then at least benevolently neglected, nestled into the city. It’s her place and she knows its rhythms. She may be a transplant (she’ll lie and say she’s not because no one wants to admit to an Ohio birth certificate), but Gotham is her home.

She wants to go home. She misses her dad. He needs her there. She misses her community and her networks. When she had problems in Gotham, there were people she could call. People who would help her move for a six pack of beer and a pizza. People who she trusted to run to the pharmacy when she got a UTI and needed antibiotics. People who would gather her into their midst and hold her close even on the days when it felt like her world was spiraling beyond control. In Gotham, she had safety.  
Here? Here she hires people off Craig’s list to move her boxes and hopes they don’t screw her over or charge her too much. Here, she goes to the pharmacy listless with fever, trying to hold her own in the face of all of it. Here, she sits alone in her office and her apartment and lets herself cry because even when she was home, there were days she needed to cry alone.

She doesn’t know if she can stay away the years she will need to gain the kind of experience she will need to return. Having broken with Eric, the only way to go back will be with his blessing. And, she doesn’t think Eric Bishop will ever be willing to work with her again. She knows Eric Bishop will not hire her again. She’s not sure if she could let herself go back to that, even if he’d have her. But, if Eric Bishop won’t hire her and Eric Bishop won’t collaborate with her and Eric Bishop is the man who controls geographical information studies at GSU, then she’s not sure if she could get a tenure track job there. Maybe she could wait for Eric to leave, but she might be waiting forever far from home.

She stares at the posting. She stares at the possibility. She wishes she had the data to discern the future, that some great God would whisper in her ear and tell her what to do. That there was some pattern that she could find, if she only just knew where to look. That she could go consult an oracle, even if she might not believe her.

**Author's Note:**

> In my timeline for this series, I have Barbara doing a postdoc outside Gotham, although she isn't Oracle, yet. This is set at least a year after _Cron Job_ and _Binary Functions_ (which take place around the same time), a few months after Barbara graduates with her PhD.
> 
> I have... not read enough comics for this, but also, Im pretty sure the comic book writers never did a PhD, so there's that, too. 
> 
> But, please, let me know... 
> 
> Questions, Comments, Concerns, Suggestions, or alternative career paths for both me and/or Barbara all welcome.


End file.
